An atheist was seated next to a little girl on an airplane and he turned
to her and said, “Do you want to talk? Flights go quicker if you strike
up a conversation with your fellow passenger.”

The little girl, who had just started to read her book, replied to the total
stranger, “What would you want to talk about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the atheist. “How about why there is no God,
or no Heaven or Hell, or no life after death?” as he smiled smugly.

“Okay,” she said. “Those could be interesting topics but let me ask
you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same
stuff – grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns
out a flat patty, but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?”

The atheist, visibly surprised by the little girl’s intelligence,
thinks about it and says, “Hmmm, I have no idea.” To which
the little girl replies, “Do you really feel qualified to discuss
God, Heaven and Hell, or life after death, when you don’t know shit?”

And then she went back to reading her book.

Heartwarming, wonderful, except it’s complete bollocks, and falls into the trap of what some people would like to believe atheists think, as opposed to what is actually the case. At the time of writing, it has 357,000 likes and 239,000 shares on Facebook.

So, leaving out the smarminess of the putative girl in the story, the creepiness of any adult stranger trying to chat up a girl on a flight, and the fact that this conversation never took place and is a metaphor for the Atheism / Theism debate, this story still bugs me.

Atheists *don’t* claim to have special knowledge about God’s non-existence.

The implication in this piece is that most atheists somehow assume to know for certain that he doesn’t exist, enabling critics to accuse us of smugness, arrogance and a gross error of logic, in that we are trying to prove a negative. The child can then disabuse us of this arrogance by asking a simple question. Atheists can’t know for certain whether God exists, but if he does exist, we can legitimately ask what he actually does. Does he control the planets, the moon and the weather? Our current knowledge of astronomy implies something completely different, and altogether more compelling. Did he create the Universe? Then why did he make it so awesomely big, if our species has some role in his plan? Does he heal the sick? Then what about all the people he doesn’t heal, despite all their earnest pleas? Does he bring peace to the world? 2,000 years of brutal post-Jesus violence and genocide would suggest not. Does he comfort people in their suffering? Then why are Hindus comforted by their gods in the same way Christians find comfort in God? So what does God do, if he is said by so many people to exist? That’s really all atheists are asking. If he doesn’t do all that much (and there are often better explanations) then why invest so much effort and self-sacrifice in believing in him?

The girl’s question is a non-sequitor.

The response the girl gives is completely immaterial to the subject under discussion, and could be used for any situation, and even the other way around. Her intent is to imply that since you don’t know some things, then you can’t presume to know other things. Had the atheist decided to talk about paint, she could have used the same approach. Had her fellow passenger been a Christian, she could have asked the same question with precisely the same response. And, since atheists don’t presume to know in the first place, it’s a completely bogus argument.

Who is more likely to strike up a conversation about God with a total stranger?

Somehow, I don’t think many atheists are really that into foisting their views on others. The obligation to proselytise is more a Christian thing. We atheists don’t really care what you believe, so long as your intent is not to foist your views on others, or to re-organise society based solely on a presumed set of diktats from your god.

So who is the arrogant one?

By setting up this straw man argument, Power is implying that the God question should be out of bounds. To me, this is extraordinarily arrogant. How dare we ask questions. It appears that some things, no matter how illogical, unrealistic or wrong-headed, are supposedly immune from honest inquiry.

One thing I agree: atheists don’t know shit. In this respect we’re pretty much like everyone else, Christians included. We know some things well and other things not well at all. The difference seems to be, however, that we desire to know things, even if that means upsetting a few sacred cows on the way. How good it would be if this thirst for knowledge was appreciated by the very many people who liked Joe Power’s snide and dismissive Facebook post.

Thanks for your article Colm and for pointing out the straw man argument.

Power’s story bugged me as well when it first came to my attention recently, but somehow I doubt his interest in either God or Atheism, rather I suspect this story was created for purposes such as increasing public awareness of Joe Power, undertaking market research, and to generate a list of potentially suggestible customers, in a similar manner to ’like-farming’ and ‘type amen’ scams.

In implying that the God question is out of bounds, I suggest the intention may be to identify those who will likely not question Power, and eliminate those like me in whose minds a perturbing warning siren goes off whenever I read such a story.

Yes. After five years on Facebook, this not being the first time I have been faced with this type of story/issue, I have cancelled my account and do not intend to consider rejoining until they add a dislike button so I can make it clear I am against bigotry and the like, and for all dislikes to be counted and displayed, in the same way as likes are counted and displayed. Only having a like button in circumstances like this, feels to me a bit like being offered the chance to vote in a election, only to discover there is just one candidate on the ballot paper, and then subsequently reading of the sole candidate rejoicing at his victory. https://m.facebook.com/joe.power.7/posts/210265179128365

I didn’t know about the new buttons, thanks for telling me, no sign of them here yet, but I withdrew my FB cancellation and look forward to trying them out. To me just having a ‘like’ button serves to reinforce people’s confirmation bias that you mention in another musing, so I feel the new buttons are a big improvement, but in the case of things like this little girl story, I’m not sad or angry about them, I just dislike them, so I would still like a dislike button.

I usually intensively Google the background of things like this and wish I had, for it seems it was not Power’s story at all, rather that it may have started life at least as far back as the 1990’s as a supposed ‘joke’ about nuclear power, and evolved into further jokes about atheists and President Obama as described by ‘mwc’ in post # 8 at

and has been published in joke books, as becomes clear if you Google the line,
‘Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?’

Before reading the above ex-christian forum, I had never heard of ‘face-palming’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facepalm before, and unsuccessful attempts to introduce a face-palming button to FB, which might well I feel be an even better response to this story than hitting a dislike button.

I prefer to leave little girls out of the subject of such jokes, but I also know that millions of children across the world today in even their 3 year of age, may well feel in desperate need of simple, devastatingly effective retorts to their parents and others attempts to inculcate, coerce or browbeat them into sharing their particular religious, political or other beliefs the child does not wish to adopt, and that the ability of a child to deliver such retorts, may be critically important to the survival of its unique individuality, without which it may literally become lost all its life.

Especially with their limited understanding and vocabulary, I would certainly wish to respect a child’s likely defensive, sincere expression that my or others beliefs were literally ‘shit’, so on reflection maybe this story/joke isn’t without its merits for me.